I'm finally on christmas vacation and I want to dedicate a week on developing my game. I'm currently working on modeling and texturing a barrel. I already have the barrel modeled and now I want to texture it, but I don't know how. Can anyone give me some tips or a link to a good tutorial about texturing and applying textures to objects in 3ds max?

Assuming your barrel is not rectangular but cylindrical in shape, after applying texture via material editor (press M) you can use Unwrap UVW or UVW map modifier to adjust texture. This site is good: http://www.3dtotal.com/

a barrel sounds easy this may help

Im a blender guy never worked with 3dmax but
merry xmas

What i usually do with a barrel is throw a cylindrical map around it to unwrap it so you get a straight square. Then put on a wooden boards/planks photo and edit it to your liking. Stretching should not be noticeable otherwise you could scale the top and bottom edgeloops down but this ill make texturing with photo's harder.